What a Pointless Post

Sometimes after a bad artistic experience you gotta scrub your innards all clean-like any way you know how. After last night's brouhaha with Mr Williamson I used the following things to decongest my aesthetic sinuses.

I was looking for an old version of the 1910 ragtime number Chinatown, My Chinatown, and came across this decent cover. During my search I realised that the song has some pretty racist lyrics, so I guess it's lucky that this one's just an instrumental.

More importantly: I also came across THIS VERSION and have been listening to it all day. It's by Tabby Andriello, and nobody really knows much about him or why he recorded the song on an album titled "The World's Greatest Mediocrity." I did manage to track down the following data:

"Tabby Andriello is Frank Andriello, my uncle... he is deceased, was never married nor did he have any children. He died October 3, 1988, the fifth of seven children born to a Calabrian tailor on April 9, 1920 , immigrated to the US at a very early age and grew up on the East Side... Among other things he made his living as a sound effects man. He won an impressive number of Clios and Andys for his work on many prominent TV and Radio commercials, as well as record albums for the likes of Peter Paul and Mary, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones and the soundtrack for Jim Henson's award-winning surreal short Time Piece. The scholarship named after him at the Greenwich House Music School was his way of saying thanks; it was there that the GI Bill enabled him to complete a four-year course of study in music theory and composition. Beside his music, his incredible talent and great personality he may be best remembered for his unmanning resemblance to Fiorello LaGuardia when he was cast as the Major of Kovettes in full-page ads for the department store."

You can listen to the whole album here.

Or you can check out Cindy and Bert's "Der Hund Von Baskerville". It seems to be a late 60s narcoleptic rendering of the Sherlock Holmes classic set to a Black Sabbath tune while lost-looking hipsters dance as if someone is holding a gun to their family off-camera.


I don't know that I can really get through all of 20 Minutes to Go, but I just like that it exists. That somewhere out there someone felt the need to raise an (admittedly tiny) budget so that finally a short film/music clip could be made explaining The Rapture to the rest of us. We're all going to blow ourselves up while wearing awesome 80s clothes, it suggests, but then we'll all be taken bodily to Heaven where flowers talk, people wear togas and everyone can fly.



The Leave Me Alone Box is a nice philosophical curio that I dig. A box with a switch. When you flick the switch and turn on the box, a hand emerges and turns it back off. A machine whose only function is to deactivate itself. I love it.

And finally, Dell linked to some amazing photo art today that just rocks out like a person who hasn't learnt or doesn't totally get social inhibition. It's great. By a Korean artist named Yeondoo Jung, the Wonderland series is the best. Children's drawings used as the basis for stunning photographs.





I would like to live in this world.